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Joy 1
Hamlet and His Problems
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Hamlet and His Problems is an essay written by T.S. Eliot in 1919 that offers a critical
reading of Hamlet. The essay first appeared in Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on
Poetry and Criticism in 1920. It was later reprinted by Faber & Faber in 1932 in Selected
Essays, 1917-1932.[1] Eliot's critique gained attention partly due to his claim
that Hamlet is "most certainly an artistic failure." Eliot also popularised the concept of
the objective correlative—a mechanism used to evoke emotion in an audience—in the
essay. The essay is also an example of Eliot's use of what became known as new
criticism.[2]
Content
Eliot begins the essay by stating that the primary problem of Hamlet is actually the play
itself, with its main character being only a secondary issue. Eliot goes on to note that
the play enjoys critical success because the character of Hamlet appeals to a particular
kind of creatively minded critic. According to Eliot, a creative-minded individual who
directs his energy toward criticism projects his own character onto Hamlet. As a result,
the critic becomes biased in favor of and fixated on the character. Eliot accuses Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge of this, stating that Goethe's
critique turns Shakespeare's tragic hero into his own Werther while Coleridge's "Lecture
on Hamlet" made Hamlet into a Coleridge. Eliot wrote that due to their fixation on
Hamlet rather than the play as a whole, the type of criticism that Coleridge and Goethe
produced is "the most misleading kind possible".[2]
Eliot follows this by praising J.M. Robertson and Elmer Edgar Stoll for publishing
critiques that focus on the larger scope of the play. He argues that a creative work
cannot be interpreted, only criticized according to a standard or in comparison to
another work. The function of interpretation in this argument is to make the reader
aware of relevant historical information that they are not assumed to know. Eliot credits
Robertson in particular for his historical interpretation of Hamlet.
Next, Eliot names three sources on which Shakespeare is believed to have based his
play: Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, The Ur-Hamlet, and a version of the play
performed in Germany during Shakespeare's lifetime. He notes the differences
between Hamlet and its source material, pointing out that in the earlier works the only
motive for murder is revenge, the delay of which is the result of circumventing the king's
guards. The Hamlet of the earlier play also uses his perceived madness as a guise to
escape suspicion. Eliot believes that in Shakespeare's version, however, Hamlet is
driven by a motive greater than revenge, his delay in exacting revenge is left
unexplained, and that Hamlet's madness is meant to arouse the king's suspicion rather
than avoid it. Eliot finds these alterations too incomplete to be convincing, and feels that
the prose of the two texts is so similar in some sections that it appears that
Shakespeare simply revised Kyd's text. Eliot concludes this section by agreeing with
Dr. Joy 2
Robertson's assertion that the hero of Hamlet is driven more by his mother's guilt than
revenge for the father, and Shakespeare fell short in combining this altered motive with
his source material.
The latter portion of the essay is dedicated to Eliot's criticism of Hamlet based on his
concept of the objective correlative. He begins by arguing that the greatest contributor
to the play's failure is Shakespeare's inability to express Hamlet's emotion in his
surroundings and the audience's resultant inability to localize that emotion. The
madness of Shakespeare's character, according to Eliot, is a result of the inexpressible
things that Hamlet feels and the playwright cannot convey. Eliot concludes that because
Shakespeare cannot find a sufficient objective correlative for his hero, the audience is
left without a means to understand an experience that Shakespeare himself does not
seem to understand.[2]
Objective correlative
The objective correlative concept that Eliot popularized in this essay refers to the
concept that the only way to express an emotion through art is to find "a set of objects, a
situation, [or] a chain of events"[2] that will, when read or performed, evoke a specific
sensory experience in the audience. This sensory experience is meant to help the
reader understand the mental or emotional state of a character. [3] Eliot writes that
Hamlet's state of mind is a direct result of his confused emotions and the lack of
external representation for these emotions in an objective correlative. He goes on to say
that Hamlet's initial conflict is a disgust in his mother, but his feelings regarding the
situation are too complex to be represented by Gertrude alone. Neither Hamlet nor
Shakespeare can grasp or objectify these feelings, and so it acts as an obstacle to the
character's revenge and Shakespeare's plot. But Eliot points out that if Shakespeare
had found an objective correlative for Hamlet's internal conflict, the play would be
entirely changed because the bafflement that characterizes it is a direct result of
Shakespeare's shortcomings in this respect.
Eliot does, however, give credit to Shakespeare's use of the objective correlative in his
other works. As an example, he references a scene in Macbeth in which Lady
Macbeth is sleepwalking and the imagined sensory impressions Shakespeare provides
allow the audience to understand her mental state. [2]
Criticism[
One critical objection to Eliot's essay is that although Eliot begins "Hamlet and His
Problems" with a complaint against critics that conflate Hamlet and its hero, he then
spends a large portion of the essay focused on Hamlet the character and his effect on
the play. It has been noted that if Eliot's intent was to focus his critique on the play, he
could have titled his essay "Hamlet and Its Problems" instead.[4] Some critics have also
pointed out that Eliot offers no formal critique or concrete suggestions of how to improve
the play.
Although many critics credit Eliot's concept of the objective correlative, some take issue
with his discussion of the subject in this essay. Some critics argue that no individual can
Dr. Joy 3
say with certainty what emotion Shakespeare intended to convey in Hamlet, and thus
cannot attack Shakespeare for failing to express it. [4] Others also feel that Eliot's critique
of the play is too driven by his modernist views and that he takes Hamlet too much at
face value.
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Sacred Wood. 1921.
Hamlet and His Problems
FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and 1
Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an
especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind
which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in
creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in
Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had
Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of
Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet
remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of
criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most
misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical
insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the
substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift
effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this
play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University 2
of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the
other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the
labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing
that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were
nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on the importance of the
effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were
nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to 3
interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other
works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of
relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr.
Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their
“interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious:
that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,
each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of
Dr. Joy 4
Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole
action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be
superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary 4
dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two
plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what
this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish
Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belle forest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must
have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s
lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier,
not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier
play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused,
as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch
surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in order
to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the
other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and
which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on
grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to
lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough,
however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to
the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was
merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the
Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is little
excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in
the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the
original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before
Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of
reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in
two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we
believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is
a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that
Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the
“intractable” material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s 5
masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the
play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is
the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and
yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty
revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Dr. Joy 5
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep…
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other
profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing
versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the
tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as
“interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s
most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a
work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting
because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson 6
is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the
feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his
mother’s degradation.… The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for
drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological
solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of a
mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of
Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject
might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-
complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the
writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we
search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize.
You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous
soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might
be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy d’
Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s Hamlet not in the action, not in any
quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is
unmistakably not in the earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 7
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the
Dr. Joy 6
emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more
successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the
state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to
you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of
Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of
events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series.
The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the
emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is
dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the
facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is
genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective
equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the
face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is
occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for
it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot
understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and
obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that
Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be
noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective
equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been
to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is
just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in
Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a
simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The
levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate
plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it
is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the
dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The
intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is
something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study
to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these
feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist
keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet
of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that
explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a
problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an
insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express
the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in
his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at
Dr. Joy 7
the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie
de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by
hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the
manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things
which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Sacred Wood. 1921.
Hamlet and His Problems
FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and 1
Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an
especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind
which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in
creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in
Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had
Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of
Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet
remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of
criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most
misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical
insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the
substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift
effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this
play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University 2
of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the
other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the
labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing
that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were
nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on the importance of the
effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were
nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to 3
interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other
works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of
relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr.
Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their
Dr. Joy 8
“interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious:
that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,
each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of
Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole
action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be
superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary 4
dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two
plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what
this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish
Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must have
been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime
which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from
the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the
motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in
the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch
surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in order
to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the
other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and
which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on
grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to
lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough,
however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to
the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was
merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the
Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is little
excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in
the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the
original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before
Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of
reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in
two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we
believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is
a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that
Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the
“intractable” material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s 5
masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the
play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is
the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and
Dr. Joy 9
yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty
revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep…
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other
profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing
versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the
tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as
“interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s
most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a
work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting
because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.
The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson 6
is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the
feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his
mother’s degradation.… The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for
drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological
solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of a
mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of
Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject
might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-
complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the
writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we
search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize.
You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous
soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might
be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy d’
Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s Hamlet not in the action, not in any
quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is
unmistakably not in the earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 7
Dr. Joy 10
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more
successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the
state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to
you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of
Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of
events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series.
The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the
emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is
dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the
facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is
genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective
equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the
face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is
occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for
it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot
understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and
obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that
Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be
noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective
equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been
to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is
just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in
Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a
simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The
levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate
plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it
is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the
dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The
intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is
something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study
to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these
feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist
keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet
of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that
explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a
problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an
Dr. Joy 11
insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express
the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in
his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at
the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie
de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by
hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the
manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things
which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
The background to the Hamlet theme structure
When Shakespeare arrived in London and began his acting career he made many friends among
the theatre community. Before long he tried his hand at working on plays with the play writers
who welcomed anyone who could help them fulfill the voracious hunger for plays. His talent was
soon recognised and he became a regular member of their fraternity.
One of the writers he worked with was Thomas Kyd, who was responsible for scores of plays,
although only one has survived to be regularly performed in the 21st century – The Spanish
Tragedy. Kyd and Shakespeare became friends, and it is thought that working with Kyd, first on
an earlier play, Ur-Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s earliest forays into playwriting, and then The
Spanish Tragedy, formed a very significant part of Shakespeare’s apprenticeship.
The Spanish Tragedy was very popular. It caught the late Elizabethan taste for violence informed
by revenge, a model that became full-blown in the Jacobean theatre, subsequently known as the
genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy.’
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a revenge tragedy but, being by the mature Shakespeare, it is very much
more than that. Nevertheless, the play hangs on the skeleton of the then fashionable revenge
story – in this case, a young man told by his late father’s ghost that he has been murdered by his
brother and so, according to convention, the young man has the obligation to seek and achieve
revenge. There is no doubt that in that sense, Hamlet is the simple story of a man avenging his
father’s death. It is in the telling of that story, though, that Shakespeare made this play what is so
often described as the most famous play ever written.
Hamlet is a play about so many things that they can’t be reckoned. Those things that the play is
about are the themes. One can name them as themes but it should be remembered that all each
Hamlet theme interacts and resounds with all the others.
Here are brief accounts of a selection of the major Hamlet themes of revenge, corruption;
religion, politics, appearance and reality, and women.
6 Major Themes in Hamlet
Dr. Joy 12
The theme of revenge in Hamlet
There are two young men bent on avenging their father’s death in this play. Hamlet and Laertes
are both on the same mission, and while Hamlet is pondering his approach to the problem
Laertes is hot on his heels, determined to kill him as Hamlet has killed his father, Polonius. This
is, therefore, a double revenge story. Shakespeare examines the practice of revenge by having
two entirely different approaches to it – the hot-headed abandon of Laertes and the philosophical,
cautious approach by Hamlet. The two strands run parallel – invoking comparisons, each one
throwing light on the other – until the young men’s duel and both their deaths. The revenge
theme feeds into the religious element of the play as Hamlet is conflicted by his Christian
aversion to killing someone and his duty to avenge his father’s death, whereas it is not a
consideration for Laertes, whose duty is clear to him, and he acts on it immediately.
The theme of corruption
Corruption is a major concern in this play. The text is saturated with images of corruption, in
several forms – decay, death, poison. From the very first moments of the play the images start
and set the atmosphere of corruption which is going to grow as Shakespeare explores this theme.
The tone is set when Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ after seeing
the ghost of Hamlet’s father. What Shakespeare is doing here, and in using the image structure of
corruption, is addressing the broadly held view that a nation’s health is connected to the
legitimacy of its king. Here we have the ghost of a murdered king, and his murderer – a
decidedly illegitimate king – is sitting on his throne. All through the play, Hamlet is preoccupied
with rot and corruption – both of the body and the soul, reflecting the way in which society is
destroyed by the corruption of its inner institutions – in this case, the court, which is the
government.
Decay, rot and mould are always in Hamlet’s mind, and his language is full of those images – ‘an
unweeded garden that grows to seed – things rank and gross possess it,’ and countless images of
death and disease. He hides Polonius’ body in a place where it will decay rapidly and stink out
the castle. It’s an image of the corruption in secret places that is going to contaminate the whole
country.
The theme of religion
Religion has an impact on the actions of the characters in this play. Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’
soliloquy outlines his religious thinking on the subject of suicide. He declines to kill Claudius
while he is praying for fear of sending him to heaven when he should be going to hell. Hamlet
believes, too, that ‘there is a destiny that shapes our ends.’
One of the most important things of all in this play is the Christian idea of making a sacrifice to
achieve healing. Hamlet is Christ-like in his handling of the crisis. The court is rotten with
corruption and the people in it are almost all involved in plotting and scheming against others.
Hamlet’s way of dealing with it is to wait and watch as all the perpetrators fall into their own
traps –‘hauled by their own petards,’ as he puts it. All he has to do is be ready – like Christ. ‘The
readiness is all,’ he says. And then, all around him, the corruption collapses in on itself and the
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court is purified. Like Christ, though, he has to be sacrificed to achieve that, and he is, leaving a
scene of renewal and hope.
The Hamlet theme of politics
Hamlet is a political drama. Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his father, the king. He has
subsequently done Hamlet out of his right of succession and become king. Hamlet’s mother has
married the king while the rest of the palace is engaged in palatial intrigues, leading to wider
conspiracies and murders. The king, Claudius, determined to safeguard his position in the face of
the threat Hamlet presents, plots in several ways to kill Hamlet. Polonius plots against Hamlet to
ingratiate himself with Claudius. Characters, including Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, spy on each
other. This is all to do with power and the quest to achieve and hold it.
The theme of appearance and reality
This is a major theme in every one of Shakespeare’s plays. The text of Hamlet is saturated with
references to the gap that exists between how things seem to be and how they really are. Very
little in this play is really as it seems. That is bound to be so in a play in which there are so many
murderous plots and schemes by those who, on the surface, strive to appear innocent, like
Claudius, who, behind his charismatic smile, is a damned villain. He is, as Hamlet puts it, a
‘smiling villain.’ Although Ophelia loves Hamlet she pretends to spurn his affections. Hamlet
pretends to be mad so that he can explore the ghost’s assertion that Claudius killed him. All the
characters, in one way or another, are hiding their true intentions.
What makes this theme particularly interesting and different in this play is that as the play
develops the gap between appearance and reality narrows by the characters becoming more like
the masks they are using than any reality that may lie behind that so the identities they have
assumed eventually become their realities.
The theme of women
For much of the play, Hamlet is in a state of agitation. It is when he is talking to either of the two
female characters that he is most agitated – so much so that he is driven to violence against them.
He cares about both but does not trust either. He feels his mother, Gertrude, has let him down by
her ‘o’er hasty marriage’ to Claudius. To him, it means that she didn’t really love his father. In
the case of Ophelia, he is suspicious that she is part of the palace plot against him.
Both women die in this play. Ophelia is driven mad by the treatment she receives from the three
men – Claudius, Polonius and Hamlet – and takes her own life. Gertrude’s death is more
complex because it raises the question: how far is she responsible for the corruption that Hamlet
has to deal with?
Whilst the play features the meeting and falling in love of the two main protagonists, to say that
love is a theme of Romeo and Juliet is an oversimplification. Rather, Shakespeare structures
Romeo and Juliet around several contrasting ideas, with a number of themes expressed as
opposites. To say that the tension between love and hate is a major theme in Romeo and Juliet
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gets us closer to what the play is about. These – and other – opposing ideas reverberate with each
other and are intertwined through the text.
